Charter schools and student performance

Dr. Paul Peterson of Harvard University and the Hoover Institution has a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal that you should read. Dr. Peterson will be one of NPRI's presenters at this week's education conference at The Orleans (tickets are still available). Learn more about NPRI's education summit, titled "Success for Every Nevada Child."

Here are some select quotes from the article. Peterson on creative destruction in education:

Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that middling firms are "creatively" destroyed by good firms, which are themselves eventually eliminated by still better competitors. Ignoring this basic economic principle, critics of charter schools and other forms of school choice see no hope for competition in education. These critics ask us to leave public schools alone apart from creating voluntary national standards-speed zones without traffic tickets, as it were.

Yet few doubt that public schools today are troubled, as the president noted on Saturday. What the president left out is that the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms. If school districts were firms operating in the market place, many would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter's law of creative destruction.

Peterson on charter schools:

To identify the effects of a charter education, a wide variety of studies have been conducted. The best studies are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and educational research. Stanford University's Caroline Hoxby and Harvard University's Thomas Kane have conducted randomized experiments that compare students who win a charter lottery with those who applied but were not given a seat. Winners and losers can be assumed to be equally motivated because they both tried to go to a charter school. Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Kane have found that lottery winners subsequently scored considerably higher on math and reading tests than did applicants who remained in district schools.

In another good study, the RAND Corp. found that charter high school graduation rates and college attendance rates were better than regular district school rates by 15 percentage points and eight percentage points respectively.

Instead of taking seriously these high quality studies, charter critics rely heavily on a report released in 2004 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is hardly a disinterested investigator, and its report makes inappropriate comparisons and pays insufficient attention to the fact that charters are serving an educationally deprived segment of the population. Others base their criticism of charters on a report from an ongoing study by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo), which found that there are more weak charter schools than strong ones. Though this report is superior to AFT's study, its results are dominated by a large number of students who are in their first year at a charter school and a large number of charter schools that are in their first year of operation.